Making Jobs Rotationally Easier in 4.0

[Shurrikhan]

This sort of depends on what we want to do with WAR. I still argue WAR should lose the drains (really, DRK should have those for the sake of theme) and focus on using skills to sort of ignore part of the damage aimed at them.

Fracture could be changed into a skill that reduces damage the mob deals to the WAR for its duration in addition to the DoT effect.

The one thing I like about Warrior drains and self-heals is that they better give a feeling of a combatant in the midst of a long battle. The drains particularly also give a sense of overwhelming the enemy with sheer force, or that a good offense can be great defense. If you put just "drains" on a Warrior job page, it probably wouldn't immediately strike me as thematic as someone newish to the concept, but once you've played around with it, the playstyle might well seem hollowed without it.

Personally I just kind of to see Fracture as a skill that (1) deals potentially heavy damage, (2) creates personal bonus damage, and/or (3) mitigates (in the sense of Fracturing an enemy's ribs, their armor, or their arms), based largely off recent outputs and/or inputs. Go ham on an enemy in Deliverance and then Fracture to deal a finishing burst, or Fracture into an improved Zerk-triple-Cleave, or from Defiance and sap enemy attack power based on amounts you've been mitigating thus far.

I think tank jobs should lose tank and dps stances, and rely on actually needing to keep enmity rather than being a dps (like PLD, NIN, and WAR in FFXI).

I'm guessing you REALLY like those Butcher Block, Rage of Halone, and Power Slash animations? Because, that's all your going to see on any short fight then. At present enmity gives the ability to actually invest in holding threat from the offset without trimming your choices down to one combo every pull. Additionally, if you remove the stance variant on AoEs, how would the better geared (temporarily/mechanically-set) OT ever not pull from the MT? They can't differentiate enmity outputs. Are we going to add a second AoE to every tank, identical to the first except in that it has little to no enmity boost?
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The hints at fanfest were super vague, but I think tank attack rotations will remain mostly intact. Fracture or Scourge might be cut or combined with a WS combo (path, power slash). I hope for Sword Oath to either be removed or put on the same button as Shield Oath and for something similar to happen with Defiance/Deliverance and their mirror actions. I also expect stuff like Awareness, Bulwark, Tempered Will, Foresight, Bloodbath, and even Convalescence to be either removed or combined with other skills. A lot of that stuff is useful, just not useful or class-defining enough to occupy a single button.

Then that's one more window you lose that would otherwise make rotations more interesting. I like timing my Scourges into the stance-dance; I just want the opportunity cost of Grit reduced so that I can use that full range of the DRK's toolkit and complexity more viably.

Toggles and auto-swapped keys would indeed be a godsend. Personally, I'd like to the Oaths revised as well, but as you've said, you don't need to remove an mutually exclusive ability for it not to take up space; you just need to stack it with its mutual exclusives.

What's more interesting is I seem to remember them saying something about cross class getting some pretty significant overhauls with abilities being grouped by role instead of class. If all tanks are drawing from the same crossclass pool then that opens up some possibilities. If Flash were made into a targeted AOE (rather than point blank) so that you could pull with it, they could remove Shield Lob/Tomahawk/Unmend. If Overpower was cross-classable, they could get rid of Unleash. Perhaps we'll get some new skills there that don't even belong to any one class but provide a tool that every tank has to have (like Provoke).

But none of that frees up SPACE. It only homogenizes jobs far more obviously. The very word for ranged/AoE tank enmity would just be "Flash". Why do that?